Thanksgiving 2016 – The long genocide of descendants of the original inhabitants of the corner of the planet we today call the United States of America proceeds unabated. And so, therefore, continues the resistance.

At Standing Rock in spirit. Yoko Ono and John Lennon join Native people at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1973.

The fight to preserve the earth’s water and allow it to run naturally through the veins of the planet is an extension of the resistance of the colonial period of U.S. history. The earth-destroyers today use pipelines, hydro-fracking and genetic engineering (and now apparently water cannons and experimental sonic weapons) where they once used the Gatling gun. In some places (like Israel’s control of Palestinian’s water supply) they use both.

The remaining Standing Rock Sioux Indians have united over 100 tribes from across the U.S. and thousands of allies and have been gathering in Cannon Ball North Dakota over these last months to protect their drinking water and historic burial grounds from the ravages of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPl), being built by the private corporation Energy Transfer Partners for $3.8 billion. The pipeline is slated to transport fracked oil from the Bakken shale fields in North Dakota to a transfer point in Illinois, dipping underneath the Missouri River less than a mile upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux’s drinking water supply as well as through the Tribe’s sacred and historical lands, according to tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II. If the Protectors don’t succeed in blocking its construc­tion, the pipeline will become a climate disaster. Tribal leaders are fight­ing in court to stop it, but the company’s CEO, Kelcy Warren, declared, “There’s not another way. We’re building at that location.”

The pipeline was initially supposed to go through the City of Bis­marck, but that was rejected due to opposition there. The planned route was then shifted south into Indian territory despite the fact that it now will go through territory ceded to the Sioux in The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

That 1851 Treaty was signed in the course of the U.S. government’s colonial activities, but it was soon deemed to have ceded too much ground. The gov­ern­ment wanted to run a rail line through the territory and so replaced the 1851 treaty by a second one in 1868 following the Civil War, which limited the Sioux to territory now within South Dakota (the Dakota Territory was divided into two states, North and South, in the 1880s). Some tribes agreed to accept the new treaty, but others whose traditional hunting grounds were more to the north opposed it. The gov­ern­ment proceeded to try to cram this new “treaty” down the throats of the Indigenous who had rejected it.

The new treaty did include the Black Hills, long revered by many tribes in the Dakotas. But soon, prospectors discovered gold in the hills, and the U.S. government felt obliged to undermine that treaty as well. The pattern of lies, conquest, land-grabbing and genocide continued.

Dakota Access’ claim isanother in the series of fracked oil and gas pipelines that in today’s world represent the ongoing corporate attempts to conquer the Native people and steal their resources backed by the U.S. military and state governments.

Early Monday morning November 21st a few hours before dawn, in one of those unheralded and yet auspicious moments that will be recorded by future historians – if there is to be any future, let alone one worth living in – private ⁭“security” officers and police hired with public funds from North Dakota’s much ballyhooed state bank (the only bank in the U.S. owned publicly by the State, which shows that the demand for state-owned banks alone is not sufficient for ensuring funding for progressive projects) turned their high-power water hoses on those gathered to protect the water, in freezing temperatures. At a press conference held by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department on Monday, November 21, a reporter asked if the use of water hoses was necessary to keep officers safe. Morton County Police Chief Jason Ziegler responded by saying, “It was effective wasn’t it?”

Police also fired concussion grenades, gas, experimental sound weapons, and so-called “rubber bullets” – the same terrifying technologies used by the British army against the anti-colonial resistance in Ireland throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Rubber bul­lets impact as though being hit by a bowling ball (made from the same very hard type of synthetic rubber). Over 300 protectors of water were severely wounded.

Many were rendered unconscious and bleeding after being shot in the head with rubber bullets Monday morning. Hundreds were treated for injuries, tear-gas exposure, and hypothermia. Jade Kalikolehuaokakalani Wool had two grenades blow up near her head, knocking her down, burning her face and sending shrapnel into it, and causing her to be hospitalized. Crystal Wilson was shot with a water cannon, tear-gassed and shot with a munition. David Demo was filming police when, without warning, they shot him with a water cannon and then in the hand with a munition. He was hospitalized with broken bones and was told he would need reconstructive surgery. Gary Dullknife III saw a Water Protector knocked to the ground by a water cannon. As police sprayed her on the ground, he tried to move her away. He was shot in the chest, stomach and leg by impact munitions. Mariah Marie Bruce was peacefully protesting when police sprayed her with water cannons. She was then hit in the genitals with a grenade, and was hospitalized. Frank Finan was taking pictures when he was shot in the abdomen and knocked to the ground by a rubber bullet. Israel Hoagland–Lynn tried to help two people who had been shot with water cannons and rubber bullets and was shot in the back of his head by an impact munition. He lost consciousness, was hospitalized, and needed 17 staples for a head wound. Noah Michael Treanor, while praying, was shot by the water hoses or cannon. Once on the ground, he was shot in the head by an impact munition. Bleeding badly, he was hospitalized.

Both the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe sent medical first aid responders to Standing Rock. Along with tribal physicians, nurses, paramedics and in­teg­rative healers working in collaboration with local emergency response teams, they triaged and treated the injuries. They report that three elders were struck, and one went into cardiac arrest. A team of earth protectors managed to revive him, and got his heart beating again; he remains in critical condition along with 26 others taken to the hospital.

21-year-old Sophia Wilansky of the Bronx was distributing drinking water when the Morton County Sheriff’s Department targeted her and threw a grenade, which hit her and shredded her arm. She was airlifted to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis a few hundred miles away, where doctors are bit-by-bit trying to rebuild a somewhat functioning arm and hand. (The first surgery took a vein from her leg which they have implanted in her arm to take the place of the missing arteries. She will need multiple surgeries to try to gain some functional use of the arm and hand.)

“There are no words to describe the pain of watching my daughter cry and say she was sorry for the pain she caused me and my wife,”

her father, attorney Wayne Wilansky, said.

“I died a thousand deaths today and will continue to do so for quite some time. I am left without the right words to describe the anguish of watching her look at her now alien arm and hand.”

The Morton County Sheriff’s Department denies it was using con­cus­sion grenades and is falsely claiming that Sophia was injured by a propane explosive device thrown by the protectors. Wayne Wilansky responds:

“[The Sheriff’s statements] are ridiculous. Apparently, they’ve changed their story three times since the incident occurred. My daughter is very clear about the fact that she was being shot at the time. She’s got bullet wounds on her body. And she was backing away at the time, and she was trying to reach for a shield so that the bullets wouldn’t hit her at the time that the concussion grenade hit her in the arm and exploded. Witnesses that I’ve spoken to said that the police officers – it takes seven seconds for these concussion grenades to go off. And Instead of throwing them on the ground, they pulled the plug, held them for five seconds and threw them directly at her. So, I’d say that the comments from the Mor­ton County Sheriff’s Department are utterly absurd and ridiculous and not worthy of a shred of belief.”

Wilansky says that the grenade pieces that have been removed from her arm in surgery will be saved for legal proceedings. Nermeen Shaikh of Democracy Now! asked Wayne Wilansky what he was demanding (November 23, 2016). Wilansky said:

“President Obama has to step in there and stop this. They’re drilling now even though they don’t have a permit. The Army Corps of Engin­eers has asked them to stop. The Army Corps of Engineers has said that they were not going to issue a permit until after they did further environmental studies and spoke with the tribe, and yet they go ahead and set all the drills in place, and they continue. They’re probably drilling under the river right now, as we speak. And it’s a very, very dangerous situation there.

“And that’s just thing Number One. Number Two is they have to demilitarize the police there. There’s no reason that the police should be intentionally trying to kill people, maim people. And this has to stop.”

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both propound the earth-destroying technology of hydro-fracking. Examining what evil those hirelings of capital have per­petrated in order to advance their master’s profits acquired by fracking the earth and constructing a pipeline to transport their ill-gotten oil reveals the sordid history of plunder and resistance that defines and defies Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving. President Barack Obama could have (and still could) pre­vented or at least delayed such tragedy with a few words and a signature on a simple Executive Order. But he refuses to do so.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who has claimed to be Cherokee, said she opposes the pipeline when questioned by a supporter, but has avoided making any public comments on the issue. Hillary Clinton issued a neutral, meaningless statement after protesters sat in her campaign headquarters demanding action. Since her defeat to Donald Trump, she has refrained from devoting any effort to addressing the Dakota Access Pipeline. Democratic Party leaders in the Senate, including Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, have ignored the issue.

This is likely because the Dakota Access Pipeline is being funded by some of the most prolific donors to the Democratic Party. Sunoco Logistics Partners is set to acquire Energy Transfer Partners, the company constructing the pipeline, while Sunoco will oversee its operation. The owners of the company primarily consist of Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has been one of the top recipients of campaign donations from Wall Street, and he has encouraged Wall Street firms to spread their donations to other Democrats. After the 2008 economic recession, Schumer received 15 percent of Wall Street donations to the Senate in 2009, nearly twice as much as any other Senator. “Wall Street welcomes expected Chuck Schumer promotion,” read a CNN headline from 2015 immediately following Reid’s announced retirement.

In December 2015, congressional leaders rescinded a 40-year-ban on oil exports, increasing the potential profits the Dakota Access Pipeline could yield its investors if government officials don’t intervene. Based on their slow reaction so far, and the Democratic Party establishment progressively favoring its corporate and wealthy donors, that window of opportunity for the Obama Administration and top Democrats to step in before Trump enters the White House is rapidly closing.

For those in power morality is an expedient turned inside out and readily sacrificed at the altar of corporate profit. Standing Rock serves as a reminder of how important it is to resist those puppets in government, as well as those who are pulling their strings.

Phillip Two Trees Freeman writes:

“I am Lakota Oglala Brule Sioux of the Rosebud tribe. This isn’t about native Americans, it’s about big banks helping big oil and gas continue to frack, inject toxic fluids into the earth’s aquifers. This endeavor by big oil and banks are multi-faceted. Make as much money as possible no matter the damage and gain water rights. How much control over the people would they have if they get this done?

“I will wager that if I kept you from drinking for two days, by the dawn of the third all will do whatever is told them to quench their thirst. Water is life. It is the great mystery. We all breathed our mother’s water for months. We are born of her water. We are 2% saline water, just as the sea is, but we cannot drink sea water. Water has the highest surface tension of any liquid, is the most powerful solvent known, can exist in three states at sea level, water expands as its temperature is lowered. And it holds memory, our intentions. It’s used as a sacrament the world over. It is the single most important resource on the planet. We talk about terraforming Mars when we can’t be good stewards of our own home. Soon all will learn they cannot eat money.”

A delegation of doctors trained at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba announced they will head to Standing Rock to “serve in solidarity.”

In a late Thursday Facebook post, a group of U.S.-based medical professionals trained at Cuba’s famous Latin American School of Medicine, or ELAM, announced they will head to Standing Rock “to humbly serve in solidarity with the Sacred Water Protectors on the front lines of the current human rights and ecological crisis occurring right now in North Dakota.”

Dr. Revery P. Barnes, a graduate of ELAM, said in a post on Facebook, “We answer the call to serve in alignment with the mission and core principles of our alma mater and dedication to our commitment to serve underserved communities in our HOME country.” The delegation will work in collaboration with the Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council.

“While Cuba instilled in us an unwavering commitment to internationalism, with the acceptance of a full scholarship to medical school at ELAM, we made the moral commitment to respond to the needs of our most vulnerable communities here at home in the U.S.,” the statement continued. [December 2, 2016]

ANGELA BIBENS: Right now we’ve seen people who have been maced. They deployed 20 mace canisters in a small area in less than five minutes, to the point where people have lost bowel function. At least one seizure has been witnessed at the front lines by our legal observation team. There have been people vomiting from the exposure to the mace. The water cannon has been mixed with the mace, and so even our legal observers have been exposed and are trying to deal with that while they’re doing up their notes. And canisters were shot at the medic area at the front line. There is at least one woman who has a broken kneecap. At least one elder went into cardiac arrest and was revived through CPR at the front line by medics. (I’ve edited the interview below …. – MC)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sunday’s attack comes as water protectors face an increasingly militarized crackdown against the movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline over concerns the construction will destroy sacred tribal burial sites and that a pipeline spill could contaminate the Missouri River. The state of North Dakota has approved $10 million to police the ongoing resistance. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple has activated the National Guard. Over 400 people have been arrested during the ongoing protests, and many report being subjected to strip searches while in the Morton County jail in North Dakota.

The water protectors have also faced attacks and surveillance from private security companies working for the Dakota Access pipeline com­pany. On September 3rd, unlicensed private security guards unleashed attack dogs on Native Americans trying to protect a tribal burial site from destruction. The private security firm TigerSwan security is in charge of coordinating intelligence for the Dakota Access pipeline company. TigerSwan has links to the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater.

Another security company at Standing Rock is G4S, formerly Wack­en­hut. “The dogs are from Frost canine, owner, Bob Frost of Louisville Ohio. The female dog handler in the videos is Ashley Nicole Welch of Burton Ohio, a friend of Bob Frost,” writes a former deputy sheriff in Florida. “There are more than two dozen banks assisting Energy Transfer Partners in financing this insanity.”

Juan Gonzalez is joined by Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill, who has spent years reporting on private security contractors, including TigerSwan.

Welcome back, Jeremy. What about the situation in North Dakota?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, first of all, let’s remember that we’re speaking a week when there’s the big American holiday, Thanksgiving, and I always think of the slaughter of the indigenous people in this country around this time of year and people like Leonard Peltier, the political prisoner. Unfortunately, it seems like yet another president is going to leave office without pardoning Leonard Peltier. But to watch what we’re seeing of the protectors on this indigenous land facing environmental-destroying companies really brings home the kind of utter hypocrisy of the narrative about the United States of America. Also, if you look at the way these indigenous people and their supporters are being treated versus the Bundy ranchers who didn’t occupy their native land; they went and they took over federal land with weapons and ended up getting acquitted, including of the charges that they were very clearly guilty of, which is all these weapons possession charges – it makes you wonder, if this is the state of affairs under President Obama, who actually has visited Native reservations and Native territories, what’s going to happen under Trump?

And this firm, TigerSwan, was founded by a Delta Force operative named James Reese and has done voluminous amounts of covert and overt work for the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. You have this convergence of all that has been so wrong in the post-9/11 world, with these big environment-destroying companies, the stripping even further of indigenous rights, private security forces, the brutality against pro­test­ers, the paramilitarization of law enforcement. And now our incoming president – I still feel strange saying that – Donald Trump also has business connections to the pipeline project. Is he going to divest? This is going to go from the level of Obama just being really bad on these policies to Trump actively trying to make it worse for the environment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a recent interview, the head of the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer Partners, said he’s 100 percent confident that Trump will support the completion of the Dakota Access pipeline. Kelcy Warren has donated more than $100,000 to Trump’s campaign, while Trump himself has between $500,000 and a million dollars invested in Energy Transfer Partners, according to his own disclosures.

JEREMY SCAHILL: When Cheney was coming in, we were talking about Enron and the people that they put on their commission about energy. You know, Trump’s choice of who he’s going to put in as energy secretary or secretary of the interior – they’re even talking about potentially Sarah Palin being the interior secretary. Was Ronald McDonald not available? It’s really sick, some of the people. You know, putting Mike Huckabee in charge of health and human services, a guy who said that abortion is worse than the Holo­caust? It really feels like we’re watching a not-so-slowly moving train-wreck in this country right now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Or even floating the idea that Joe Arpaio, who’s just been voted out as Maricopa County sheriff, would become head of homeland security. Although at 82 years old, I doubt that he wants to come to Washington.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. It would be an amusing, you know, [Arpaio’s] Senate confirmation hearing. What’s more likely, but in the same category, is Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, who is African-American himself but has called Black Lives Matter subhuman. He’s said there is no such thing as police brutality, and led the chants of “Blue lives matter” at the Republican National Convention. Clarke is a regular on Bill O’Reilly’s show and others on Fox News. …

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You reached out to the Morton County Sheriff’s Office to try to get some information on the private security firms. What happened?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, the Morton County sheriffs released documents, internal documents, about their investigation into the dog handlers. And what they inadvertently revealed was that this company, TigerSwan, run by these Delta Force guys, was actually in charge of coordinating the intelligence operations against the protesters.

One word of advice to all the protesters there: Do not believe that your cellphones or your computers are clean and uncompromised. I guarantee you that they’re using the entire suite of surveillance devices. I know that people have been complaining that their cellphones have been down, their internet has been down. That can be caused by surveillance weaponry targeting their devices. It could be because there are so many people using them. But my guess would be that they are using people’s devices, meaning law enforcement and private security, as geo-tracking devices And people should be very aware that the full CIA/NSA-devel­oped suite of tools that now have made it into the hands of local law enforcement in this country are most certainly trained on those activists and their supporters.

Meanwhile, scores of U.S. military veterans have announced plans to travel to North Dakota to join the protests.

WHAT TO DO?

– Bombard TD Bank and CitiGroup with letters and complaints.– Both have holdings in Energy Transfer Partners

– Standing Rock medics say that the Water Protectors are in critical need of the following items:

Special thanks to Chris Kinder, Barbara Deutsch, Isis Feral and Malika Moro for research and commentary.

From Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz:

Thanksgiving has never been about honoring Native Americans. It’s been about the origin story of the United States, the beginning of geno­cide, dispossession and constant warfare from 1607 in Jamestown until the present. It’s a colonial system that was set up.

There’s a sort of annual calendar for this origin story, beginning with Columbus, October 12. Why celebrate Columbus? It was the onset of colonialism, the slave trade and dispossession of the Native people of the Americas. So, that is celebrated with a federal holiday. That’s followed by Thanksgiving, which is a completely made-up story to say the Native people welcomed these people who were going to devastate their civili­zations, which is simply a lie. And then you go to Presidents’ Days, the Founding Fathers, in February, and celebrate these slaveowners, Indian killers. George Washington headed the Virginia militia for the very pur­pose of killing Native people on the periphery of the Virginia colony. And then we have the big day, the fireworks, July 4th, independence, which is probably the most tragic event in world history, because it gave the world a genocidal regime under the guise of democracy.

I’m a historian, so that’s the historical context that I think we have to see Thanksgiving in, that it is a part of that mythology that attempts to cover up the real history of the United States.

When Thanksgiving was introduced as a holiday by Abraham Lin­coln during the Civil War, there was no mention of pilgrims and Native people or food or pumpkins or anything like that. It was simply a day for families to be together and mourn their dead and be grateful for the liv­ing. And I think that’s an appropriate holiday, how people should enjoy it. They should take Native Americans and Puritans out of the picture for it to be a legitimate holiday of feast and sharing with family and friends.

I send greetings to the people at Plymouth. They have, for many years – I think it’s almost 40 years now – stood up and testified to the lie of Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower, the pilgrims. And this is very hard for people to give up. This is nationalism. Am­ericanism is white supremacy and represents negative things. There’s almost no way to reconcile it. It simply has to be deconstructed and faced up to; otherwise, there will be no social change that’s meaningful for anyone.

LEONARD PELTIER

* * * * *

On Thanksgiving morning 2003, George W. Bush showed up in Iraq before sunrise for a photo-op, wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers. He cradled a platter with what appeared to be a golden-brown turkey. Washington Post reporter Mike Allen wrote that “the bird looks perfect, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.”

As the world was soon to learn (but quickly forgot), the turkey platter was a phony, a plastic decoration that Bush posed with for the cameras. Bush shook a few hands, said a few “God Bless Americas,” and scurried back to his plane as quickly as he had arrived.

Thus, in one fell swoop, the new Conquistador had tied to history’s bloody bough the 511-year-old conquest of the “New World” ­ whose legions smote the indigenous population in the name of Christ ­ with the U.S. government’s bombardment and invasion of Iraq and the torture-detentions of prisoners of war at U.S. military bases.

Center for Global Justice ♦ World Beyond War ♦ The Nuclear Resister ♦

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Clinton vs. Trump: Syphilis vs. Gonorrhea.

Donald Trump belches a line that emboldens a racist movement. But his policies — to the extent he has any — in reality would be less destructive than Hillary Clinton‘s, especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.

As one writer — Ralph Lopez — commented,

“Trump is like having the boorish, racist uncle at the family reunion but Hillary is like having a convicted mass murderer in the room.”

Clinton HAS TO turn Trump into the AntiChrist to terrify voters sufficiently so that they throw aside their good sense and their revulsion at HER history, in order to get them to vote for her.

Trump and Clinton deserve each other. We the people deserve something better.

And now, we see that instead of dealing with the substance of the emails released — and these are just the tip of the iceberg, with a lot more to come — the Clinton kleptocracy is trying divert the issue into “blaming” it all on Russia’s supposed stealing of the DNC’s emails.

Ummm, question: Wasn’t this exactly what the Repubs were attacking Clinton for doing, for using her personal email accounts to address national business under the supposition that doing so made it easier for a foreign power to hack?

So how come the DNC is now accusing Russia — falsely, at that — with hacking their insecure, revolting emails against Bernie Sanders? Did Russia write those emails? Is the DNC admitting to using unsecured servers, too?

Remember Watergate? It started with President Richard Nixon‘s henchmen trying to break into the Democratic Party headquarters to steal back the bugs they planted in trying to obtain the Dems’ playbook (i.e., today’s emails!). It was the coverup that propelled Watergate into the national spotlight and not the break-in itself, as stupid as that was. Will the similar framework play out here, but on a much larger scale? Will Hillary go to war with Russia, as she seems intent on doing (as opposed to Trump) in order to cover-up the phony charges she and the other Dem honchos are leveling at Russia?

As much as I hated Nixon, the movement forced him to do all sorts of progressive things against his instincts: The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, supporter of Guaranteed Minimum Income payments, recognition of China ….. even as he bombed the hell out of Vietnam and Cambodia. He was every bit as despicable, racist and anti-Semitic as Trump in his statements — maybe more so. But in terms of economic and environmental policy he was forced to be the most liberal president of the last 50 years, and the ruling class had to get rid of Nixon; they latched onto Watergate in order to do it.

In ’68 and ’72 we faced a very similar framing of the choices before us as we’re faced with today. The “Clean for Gene” McCarthy movement in ’68 paralleled today’s Bernie Sanders campaign. With more and more people refusing to vote for the evil of two lessers, and with fear being the driving force the Democrats are using to propel folks to vote for Clinton (who is this generation’s Hubert Humphrey, a disgusting political insider, but Clinton is much worse), I’ll be voting for Jill Stein and the Greens. Jill most likely won’t win, and even if she did it would require a mass revolutionary movement to empower the Green Party to make the changes we need. But Jill’s campaign is an expression of the social and ecological movements she — and we — come out of and continue to be involved in. Can you say the same for Clinton or Trump?

Don’t vote for “Clump”. Time to exit the Dems — DemExit — for those still hoping against hope to reform either of the twin corporate parties. They are both poison (with Hillary being a proponent not only of fracking and war with Russia, but also of Monsanto and the genetic engineering of agriculture).

The real debate is the capitalist system vs. the immune system. Let’s stand together with Jill Stein and the Greens on the side of the immune system.

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It started under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who put so much of New York City’s public space up for sale …. er, “development”.

Whether it was community gardens, the City’s water supply under Rudy Giuliani, public hospitals, parks, housing, public radio, prisons, or public libraries, NYC’s 3-term billionaire Mayor prettified the theft of public resources by calling it “public-private partnerships”. The Manhattan Institute — a reactionary “think tank” shaping public policy — presented “partnerships” as its preferred model, enabling the privatization of all sorts of publicly owned projects under the guise of “improving” them.

And so went the Donnell Library, the 2nd biggest library in the NY Public Library system with — prior to 2008, when it was shut down and slated for demolition — 300,000 books and heavy-duty research facilities. As the Committee to Save the NY Public Library wrote in 2012:

The Donnell Library appears to be a model for how the NYPL plans to “transform” libraries (including the Mid-Manhattan), selling off the real-estate and shrinking them into much smaller spaces designed for socializing rather than learning.

The much-loved Donnell was an oasis of light and air, and featured an exceptional children’s library along with outstanding foreign language and audio-visual collections. It was sold to developers for a pittance and demolished in 2009. As [NY Times architectural critic Michael] Kimmelman writes,

Across West 53rd Street from MoMA, the Donnell Library Center, a long-shuttered branch of the New York Public Library, is scheduled to reopen late next year at the same spot but in the bowels of a new luxury hotel, at a third of its former size, with wide bleacher seating and steps as the main feature.

“More like a cultural space, which is about gathering people, giving people the opportunity to encounter each other,” is how the library’s architect, Enrique Norten, describes the plan.

It’s all the same flimflam: flexible spaces to accommodate to-be-named programming, the logic of real estate developers hiding behind the magical thinking of those who claim cultural foresight. It almost never works.

When the old Donnell — now renamed the 53rd St. Library — re-opened last week down the block from the new Museum of Modern Art, it was a shell of its former shelf, to coin a phrase. The library was now in the two basement floors of a giant luxury tower. As Citizens Defending Libraries puts it:

• The former Donnell held at least 300,000 books when the NYPL closed it (that’s by the NYPL’s own admission, we think it once held many more). The “replacement” has 20,000 books.

• The former Donnell was 97,000 square feet. The “replacement,” just over one-quarter that, 28,000 square feet.

• The former Donnell was five stories above ground, much of it newly renovated, like the new teen center and state of the art media center. It also had a marvelous new below ground auditorium. The “replacement,” is largely underground and largely book-less. The “replacement” has no media center, no teen center, no equivalent auditorium.

• The children’s room is in the basement of the “replacement,” not so the old Donnell.

The City is reported to have been paid either $59 million (the original figure) or $67 million (a new figure, reflecting some fancy footwork and bookkeeping) for the rights to knock down the old library and build their luxury condo. The penthouse is now on the market for $54+ million alone, and apartments on the upper floors are going for $23 million, each.

I looked around the new library and was struck by the relative absence of books, lack of “stacks”, and the sterility of the children’s reading room.

Here’s a report I filed on the re-opening after 8 years of the Donnell Library, and the protest outside of it.

And, as I said, this “public-private partnership” has now become the model for all library improvements throughout the City. A big fight is underway in Brooklyn Heights, where Bloomberg’s scheme is now being driven by Mayor Bill deBlasio. Brooklyn’s second most popular library (containing a major business library and other research facilities) has been stripped of all its books and only a fierce movement among library defenders stands between the historic structure and the wrecking ball, with the Sunset Park library and others to follow suit.

Here is the seventh in an ongoing series of reports in which I trace the sale of the Brooklyn Heights library and the burgeoning scandal. In this segment I interview Marilyn Berkon of Citizens Defending Libraries. The group has requested that U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara investigate Hudson Inc. and its CEO, David Kramer’s, “pay to play” donations to Mayor deBlasio’s slush fund in exchange for winning the bid on the Brooklyn Heights public library property. The report aired June 28, 2016 on WBAI radio‘s Morning Show co-hosted by Michael G. Haskins and Pam Brown.

• Report #7: interview with Marilyn Berkon of Citizens Defending Libraries. The group has requested that U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara investigate Hudson Inc.’s “pay to play” Brooklyn Heights public library sale. The report aired June 28, 2016 on WBAI radio‘s Morning Show co-hosted by Michael G. Haskins and Pam Brown.

• Report #8: Report from the re-opening of the 53rd St. Library (formerly the Donnell library), and the protest outside of it, including Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer; vice-chair of the Committee to Save the NY Public Library Theodor Gruenwald; economist Keat Foong, of Citizens Defending Libraries; and Marty Rajendron, of the Raging Grannies.

• WBAI “The Morning Show”: Michael G. Haskins Interviews Citizens Defending Libraries Co-Founders Michael D. D. White and Carolyn E. McIntyre,June 17, 2016 (interview, the last 1/2 hour about 3/4ths through the two hour show was broadcast at 7:30 AM). (Link to downloadable file.) Hear about the latest NYPL for sale, the so-called Donnell “replacement,” litigation, the federal criminal investigation, how NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman should be taking action to save the public from the loss of the Brooklyn Heights and other libraries. Jillian Jonas helped in arranging this interview.

Swim for your life, Cuba Swim for your life! Don’t give up an inch, Don’t fall for the trap! The sharks are all circling ’Round History’s bones You swim there alone Under attack Swim faster Keep swimming Keep swimming

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SOUTH AFRICAN FREEDOM FIGHTER STEVE BIKO observed: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Nowhere do those sentiments apply more than they do to Cuba during the special period of the 1990s and 2000s -– a time that was extremely harrowing for all Cubans. But the people of Cuba refused to consider themselves victims. They responded creatively. They formed new and ecologically innovative projects that might otherwise have never gotten the chance, for unless it is disrupted, the hegemony of the capitalist industrial model of dev­elopment plagues even countries aspiring to socialism.

Who would have thought 40 years ago that Fidel Castro, in his old-age, would become a stirring spokesperson for the global environmental movement, of all things? Yet, here’s Fidel:

“Should we expect that densely populated countries such as China, India, Indonesia, will have as many automobiles in proportion to their population as North Am­erica and Western Europe?”

Here’s Fidel again, this time in 1990 evaluating the effects in Cuba of the imported Eastern European machinery:

“Let’s speak clearly once and for all … We Cubans don’t export garbage. But often what we get back in trade is junk! No one else in the world buys Bulgarian forklifts. They are such garbage, only we bought them. How many hundreds, thousands of them stand idle in our warehouses? The Hungarian buses … pollute the city with fumes and poison everyone around. Who knows how many people have died from the fumes of those buses just because they put in a defective fuel pump? On top of it all, those buses have a two-speed Czech transmission that alone wastes 30 percent of the fuel! Oh, how happy I am to speak with such openness! [Fidel said.] It’s been difficult to talk about these things in the past, but thanks to these new circumstances we have been relieved of our previous compromises.”

Much of that honest evaluation and many of the ecological advances emerging from it entailed what at first were experienced as enormous sacrifices by the Cuban people. Over time, however, they became NOT sacrifices but a badge of national pride, a striving by an entire people for something greater, and a rejecting of the notion that the “good life” must be based on the mass production and accumulation of commodities and the consequent massive consumption of Nature.

This was an ideological advance. It was no small feat achieved by the Cuban revolution, even if in the beginning of the Special Period it was the result of making a virtue of necessity. Cuba’s example provided, and continues to provide, a revolutionary eco-socialist impulse inspiring many throughout the world to think about what we’d like to see in a new and humane society, how we should treat each other, animals and Nature. How can we or­gan­ize our lives so that we deepen our consciousness and com­mitment to each other and take action for social justice and for saving this god-forsaken planet?

Let me state my conclusions here, just so these points don’t get lost.

We, friends of the Cuban Revolution, need to oppose gen­etic engineering of agriculture, which is fundamentally a mechanism of colonization of the living cell. Through gen­etic engineering capitalist relations re-emerge, even in an aspiring socialist country like Cuba.

We need to refuse to accept, and to reframe, what is promulgated as “The Good Life.”

We need to train ourselves in how to think and plan holistically.

We need to stop fetishizing science and technology. They are not neutral. They do not stand apart from the class struggle. They are not our saviors. They are dripping with the ideology of the dominant capitalist framework of the societies in which they develop. To say that they are “ideology free” is itself part of that dominant ideology!

We need to reframe THE WAY we raise and fight for is­sues, so that we can create institutions that begin to im­ple­ment solutions through our own direct action, even as we make appeals to the system to do “this or that” for us. We then fight to defend those liberated zones, and we strive to expand them until they become the new society in embryo.

To do all that, we need to practice how to bring out the ecological dimension that is buried in every issue. We may need to actively search for it, but it is there. Make it visible. Take action.

* * *

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THIS PLANET – the specter of biological devastation and ecological catastrophe. It is ravaging all the ecosystems sustaining life. Butterflies, frogs, bees, redwood forests – whole familiar and essential species are in sudden danger of being wiped out by pesticides and chemical agriculture, pollution, petrochemical emissions, wastes and radiation from nuclear power plants – all fueling global climate change – and genetically engineered crops. Mechanisms for propagation – even seeds! – are coming under the private own­ership of a tiny number of very large agro-chemical corporations bent on extending their control over land – and water – and monopolizing the world’s food supply by altering the repro­duc­tive capacities of entire species.

In the U.S., this colonization is legitimized by new Enclosure Acts similar to those of centuries ago, a legal fiction codifying the shameless orgy of capitalist profit and conquest. Here’s Fidel, once again, sharply criticizing the use of the world’s available land for monocropping plants for biofuels and the resulting elimination of the world’s forests, which Fidel termed “The inter­nationalization of genocide.”

Indeed! In the last 50 years, fully 80 percent of the world’s forests have been chopped down. One Cuban scientist told me that “trees are nice to have, but they are a secondary concern when we are talking about the needs of people, which come first” – a surprisingly un-dialectical view. Forests prevent floods; they maintain healthy soil; they defuse hurricanes and detoxify drinking water. They oxygenate the air; they serve as habitats for thousands of species. In the U.S., less than 5 percent of the old-growth forests remain. In Argentina and Brazil, huge swaths of primeval rainforest are being cut down and the land mono­cropped with genetically engineered soy for animal feed and biofuels exported to the United States, Japan, China and Europe. In Indonesia, millions of acres of forest have been burned for palm oil production, mining and cattle grazing. In Mexico the Lacan­dona forest – the home of the ancient Mayan people and the Zapatista rebellion – is under siege by international paper com­panies as much as by federal troops. Under Clinton and Gore more trees were clearcut in the U.S. than by any of their predecessors in recent history – COMBINED!

The destruction of forests is one of the most notorious contributors to global climate change and the pending ecocide of this planet. The NY Times cuts down 60,000 trees per week to publish its Sunday paper. Don’t expect the Times to stray too far from its mantra of corporate “rights”.

Remember, por favor, there is no ‘Planet B’! No more the once magnificent old growth forests; no more the pristine drinking water, healthy soils, non-mutated frogs, pollinating bees, seas teeming with fish – the entire North Atlantic has been “fished out,” if you can even call what industrial trawlers do these days “fishing,” scraping miles of giant steel mesh weighing 15 tons each through the most ancient and protected parts of the world’s oceans, sweeping up everything in their path. And, as we know, the polar ice caps are melting, which is already causing the oceans to rise by many meters, and threatening to wipe out not only Greenland, but New York City and Havana within the next two decades!

One hundred and sixty years ago, the 24-year-old editor of Cologne’s Reinische Zeitung wrote forceful editorials in defense of the forest against privatization, and in favor of the rights of peasants to collect dead wood from the forest floor – lands that had been unrestricted by law and used in common for millennia. The editor – Karl Marx – railed against the state’s jack-booted storm­troopers’ expropriation of the Commons. Marx named that ex­pro­priation “primitive accumulation.” He exposed the system’s legal­ization of such plunder as part and parcel of the emerging cap­i­tal­ist class’ attempts to increase its control of the State. He pointed out that by 1842, 85 percent of all prosecutions in the Rhineland dealt with a new crime: the “theft” of dead wood lying on the ground, which the State applied only to peasants while allowing wealthy businessmen and corporations to strip whole forests with impunity. It was Marx, especially, who explained how such “en­closures” came to receive acceptance socially and sanction in law.

30-year-old Karl Marx in the offices of The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie (“New Rhenish Newspaper: Organ of Democracy”), a German daily newspaper he published between June 1, 1848 and May 19 1849.

How did it happen that people allowed public lands and early machinery to be privatized and re-shaped to serve the needs of capital? Why didn’t people revolt? (Well they did, according to Silvia Federici, in her great book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.) We can ask the same questions today: How did our once-public universities, hospitals, beaches, libraries, drinking water, parks and even prisons in the United States suddenly become privatized? Private mercenary armies now make up a large percentage of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; the water tables are so polluted that drinking water is now sold in plastic bottles, their sources owned by the world’s largest corporations, and the plastic wastes have accumulated in the Pacific Ocean forming a floating plastic island five times the size of Cuba!

It is worth remembering that Marx’s critique of capitalism started with his denunciation of the cutting down of forests for private profit, the enclosure of lands used in common, and the State’s criminalization of peasants taking dead wood for heating and cooking. Ecological justice was central to Marx’s outlook from his earliest writings. Today, Marx would be railing against indus­tri­al agriculture and especially the use of genetically engineered crops.

But since his death in 1883 and until very recently, Marx’s followers for the most part have ignored his writings on the environment and ecological justice, which were based on his for­mulation of the twin sources of value – the exploitation of Labor and the expropriation of Nature. The Communist parties have, contra Marx, repeatedly called for developing the instruments of production at any cost, rarely analyzing the vastly destructive role played by the expropriation of Nature (a primitive accumulation which is ongoing, at all times) in the production of wealth and in the reproduction of the capitalist system, which was central to Marx’s analysis of capitalist accumulation, as most tersely pre­sen­ted in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. In omitting or min­i­mi­z­ing the expropriation of nature, Marxists have allowed cap­i­tal­ism’s – and “actually existing Socialism’s” – ravaging of the envi­ronment through its industrial form of production to go unchallenged.

Along with the industrial form of production comes the following: the drudgery of the assembly line and office; the inferno of rotten relationships and rancid dreams; the privatization of ev­erything and twisting of everybody into things to be bought and sold; the reproduction and consolidation of patriarchy, hierarchy, domination and exploitation; the subjugation of Nature (and of the Nature within – our very chromosomes and cells!) to the exi­gen­cies of production and the market; the exploitation of natural and human resources; the irreversible destruction of the environment and the planet – all are embedded in industrial technology as such. Industrial technology reproduces the social conditions and ideol­o­gy of the capitalist system even under Socialism. And we, who are raised in those same conditions have become dependent on them; we can barely conceive of how to reorganize society to satisfy hu­man needs in any other way. Steeped as we are in cap­i­talist and patriarchal ideology, industrial production seems to us most “nat­ural”. Our longing for what constitutes “Pro­gress” and “the good life” is shackled to industrial production, its products, and its cap­italist integuments. Those who try to uproot those as­sumptions are smeared as quaint “throwbacks” to an earlier time or, should their challenges take root, as “Luddites” and then dismissed.

Contrary to the popular misconception, the Luddites of 1811 did NOT oppose the use of tools or machinery. They organized across England hammers in hand to dismember that new form of technology that broke up and colonized their communities – the centralized giant looms owned by a few wealthy owners. In France, they threw “sabots” (wooden shoes) into the gears (and hence the term “sabotage”). The Grow or Die system physically crushed the Luddites and other mass movements, and then obliterated memory of their heroic example from the history texts. The new technologies and the commodities produced through their use embody an ensemble of social relations that do not stand outside of the history of exploitation, organization of production, class relations, hierarchies of domination and control, the desecration of the natural environment, and destruction of the Commons. Industrial production based on the assembly line and now the genetic engineering of agriculture are technologies of colonization of both Labor and Nature, no matter the kind of system utilizing them.

We Leftists must reject the “factory form” of production altogether. The Cuban revolution had begun to envision new ways for producing the things humans need and desire, but that could only be made possible when we stop measuring “progress” through a striving for “efficiency” – at least an “efficiency” as measured through capitalist criteria. Where, for example, are all of those supposedly “inefficient” bicycles that had daily flooded the streets of Havana in the ’90s, streets that are choking, once again, on the exhaust of GM and Ford dinosaurs of the 1950s? The charms of the old cars fade quickly when we consider that they exacerbate asthma, cause lung cancer, and increase infant mortality and health costs to society as a whole – costs that the capitalist model excludes from its measure of “efficiency”. Regardless of which class owns and controls the means of production, capitalism’s shaping of “progress” and “the good life” will inevitably end up undermining the forces of socialism and ravaging the planet.

So now, let’s get back to that “bloodlash of ‘Progress’ ” and alternatives to it.

Cuba could become the world leader in global ecology, organic agriculture, and alternative and sustainable solar energy. Even in the far more impoverished and chaotic Haitian country­side Solar Energy powers whole communities. Why not in Cuba? With planning, Cuba could become the exemplar of what socialist revolution could mean in practice. It could present not only “health care for all” but, in addition, an expansive view of comple­mentary or holistic medicine freed from the biases of Western technological and pharmaceutical models. Imagine thousands of visitors flocking to Cuba to learn ecologically sound planning, farming, diet and health!

But for that to happen, the Revolution must reach deeply into that well of its most precious waters – the creativity, high political consciousness and humor of its people – that is, its Socialism! Cubans would take pride in being the first western country to reject the industrial model of science & ecology, and in leading the charge to saving the planet. That is what socialism must become. Socialists must reject that bloodlash of ‘progress’ that whips all who stray back into the neoliberal model, with its technological quick-fix “solutions” like the so-called “Green Revolution” and Genetic Engineering. We must create a new Internationale of those who exert their self-determination as a people, as anti-imperialists, and as Eco-Warriors in defense of this planet. More than ever, the choice comes down to this: The Capitalist System vs. the Immune System – for the entire planet!

Cuba has begun experimenting with the genetic engineering of agriculture. We’ve heard mixed reports about how far along that is and what the process will be in determining Cuba’s future in that regard. Socialists should not have to ask – but I guess we still need to do so – whether manufacturing living plants to withstand huge amounts of pesticides and herbicides, or turning every cell in a stalk of corn into a mini-pesticide factory that sterilizes the soil of nutrients and life and that won’t wash off, is something that socialists should applaud, regardless of whether it would increase yield – and it doesn’t even do that when all factors are considered. Please remember, we are no longer talking about the customary technologies that at least in theory could be re-called, like a car, if a flaw is discovered. Once a genetically modified organism is re­leased into the wild it cannot be taken back. It’s too late. It’s out there reproducing on its own. And, through drift, it pollutes the land and colonizes the local plants and natural environment.

Agro-Ecologists Fernando Funes Aguilar, Miguel Altieri, and Fernando R. Funes-Monzote convincingly show that newly avail­able financial and material resources … “are for the most part be­ing used to implement specialized conventional, large-scale monoculture” in Cuba. They write that “such industrial agricul­ture for export is dependent on genetically engineered corn and soy, heavy use of pesticides and herbicides, and centralized mono­cropping requiring the use of large machinery, non-organic fertilizer, and heavy use of water.”

In fact, in 2011 the pesticide manufacturer “Juan Rodriguez Gomez” IN HAVANA, produced around 100,000 liters of the herbicide Glyphosate, according to Funes. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp, a toxic herbicide suspected by Greenpeace of causing cancer and nerve disorders, and is especially dangerous for children.

Will the drive for much-needed investments let the devil out of Pandora’s box and overrun the socialist potential in Cuba’s eco­nomic and ecologically sound policies? We need to follow Fidel’s lead here and think more carefully about our acceptance of such capitalist technologies as genetic engineering and nuclear power.

I invite our comrades in the Cuban government and the Cuban people to put an end to this deadly experiment with genetic engin­eering and a return to chemical agriculture before it goes any fur­ther, and before it becomes too late to reverse course, and to pub­li­cize that position at the U.N. and throughout Latin America. Im­ag­ine the powerful shot-in-the-arm to the global movement against GMOs, should Cuba join it and provide it with socialist leadership!

I close with two excerpts from poems, the first by the great Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal:

“Nothing ever comes to the sleeper but a dream.”

And the second by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

“Rise like lions after slumber
In Unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in Sleep have fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few.”

* * *

Following the talk, Mitchel circulated the following Open Letter, and asked for signatures:

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CUBAN PEOPLE AGAINST GENETIC ENGINEERING OF AGRICULTURE

We, the undersigned friends of the Cuban revolution visiting Havana and participating in the Encuentro of “Socialist Reno­va­tion and Capitalist Crisis,” are deeply concerned with the pro­posed introduction of genetically modified agriculture to Cuba.

We recognize that unlike other technologies, once a genetically engineered organism is released into the wild, it will be difficult to recall. The engineered genes will drift, invade other plants and reproduce on their own, transforming indigenous plants in ways that are not known, unplanned, and potentially dangerous to human health and to Cuba’s sensitive ecological balance.

We oppose the genetic engineering of agriculture in our own countries and we urge a full and public discussion of this issue in Cuba, hopefully leading to Cuba’s complete rejection of gen­et­ic­al­ly engineered agricultural technology.

* Names of organizations are for identification purposes only. The indivi­d­ual signing the open letter is self-iden­ti­fying as a member of that organization, but that should not be taken to imply that the organization itself has neces­sarily taken a position on this issue.

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“Dan Berrigan was a moral giant and the closest thing we have in our society to a prophet.” – Jeremy Scahill

Mitchel Cohen writes: I was standing in the back of the jam-packed, magnificent Church of St. Francis Xavier on W. 16th St. in Manhattan Friday for the funeral and “sending off” of liberation theology Catholic priest, poet and anti-war hero Dan Berrigan, when the entire church — following the choir’s lead — broke into Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th. Spine-chilling and beautiful. As Dan Berrigan’s casket was carried slowly through the church and out into the waiting hearse, people broke the protocol and cheered and roared appreciation of a wonderful and meaningful life. Ohhhhh …….

AUDIO from last few minutes of Dan Berrigan’s funeral by Mitchel Cohen. Click HERE.

In 1981, on CNN, Chris Wallace says to Dan Berrigan, basically, “Well, you used to be famous, but nobody really pays much attention to what you do these days.” Meanwhile, a year earlier, Dan and his colleagues had gone into this nuclear plant at the General Electric factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and hammered on Mark 12A warheads, starting the Plowshares Movement, which became global. But Dan’s response to Chris Wallace was just classic Dan Berrigan and also just sort of stunning in its simple brilliance. He said, “Well, you know, we don’t view our conscience as being tethered to the other end of a television cord.”

OUTRAGED NYC VOTERS AT THE BOARD OF ELECTIONS

I am not a Democrat, I’m an enrolled Green, and I hope Bernie Sanders accepts Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s offer to run an independent campaign with her on the Green Party line. Jill Stein has even offered to run as Vice-Presidential candidate and Bernie could run for President as a Green.

In New York, Greens and other independents were not permitted to vote in the Democratic Party primary. Which is, in my view, as it should be, despite others’ calls for “Open Primaries.” We wouldn’t want hordes of corporate Democrats or Republicans swarming into the Green Party primary and taking over the Greens, right?

Still, as a Green, I made an exception and helped campaign for Bernie Sanders. It’s not often that I’d done that — in fact, I have never before campaigned for a Democrat for president. Well, at least not since Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But this campaign is so critical in raising …. not just socialism (democratic, of course), or peace, or justice, or environmental issues, but just plain old human decency in the face of lunatics and fascists (and I include Hillary Clinton in that camp. I believe she is even more dangerous than Donald Trump who is awful but not as awful as Cruz).

Below are some audio clips of interviews I’ve done for WBAI covering various election events.

Clip #1: April 14, 2016 — I inadvertently stumbled into a bar in Brooklyn, corner of Cortelyou Rd. and Coney Island Avenue. Sign in the window said “Watch the debate here”. Inside the small bar, over 70 people — mostly young — screamed at the TV, interjected comments continuously, and if there was a Hillary Clinton supporter in there at the start there weren’t any by the end.

Clip #4: April 10, 2016. On the blustery boardwalk at Coney Island, waiting for the Sanders rally. I met a man — an immigrant from Russia — who is an enrolled Republican with a very interesting story and an open mind.

Clip #5: April 7, 2016 — Haitian activists waiting in line to hear Bernie Sanders speak at his old homestead in Flatbush, near Kings Highway. They have quite a lot to say about Hillary Clinton and her despicable role in Haiti.

“No one knows who Bernie Sanders is”, said U.S. Congressional representative Charles Rangel just 3 months ago, as Rangel once again endorsed Hillary Clinton. “I never consider Senator Bernie Sanders to be in the same professional standard for the president as I do Hillary Clinton, not by a long shot.”

– U.S. Congressional Representative Charles Rangel

Americans are notorious for having very short memories. So with Charlie Rangel on the stump again for Hillary Clinton, let’s go back 8 years to 2008 when Clinton was running in the Democratic Primary for President of the United States against Barack Obama.

At polling places in Charlie Rangel’s Harlem congressional district, EDs were reporting votes of 300 to ZERO, 240 to ZERO, for Clinton over Obama — IN HARLEM.

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“We know with complete certainty that the motivation for her vile assassination was her struggle against the exploitation of nature’s common wealth and the defense of the Lenca people. Her murder is an attempt to put an end to the struggle of the Lenca people against all forms of exploitation and expulsion. It is an attempt to halt the construction of a new world. Berta’s struggle was not only for the environment, it was for system change, in opposition to capitalism, racism and patriarchy.”

The following letter by Mitchel Cohen was published in the Linewaiters’ Gazette, the newspaper of the Park Slope Food Coop.

Let me ask a question: What do terrorists eat?

Halal? Kosher? Organic? Vegetarian?

Do they shop at the Park Slope Food Coop? A government-designated “terrorist” might be working right next to you!

One Coop member (Daniel McGowan) spent 7 years in jail for so-called “eco-terrorist” acts — attempting to save the planet. A former member of the Coop (Paul Bermanzohn) was shot by the Klan — who were assisted by the FBI — 40 years ago and was seriously wounded, for demonstrating with people maligned as “terrorists”. Five were killed. Currently, people who visit Planned Parenthood — many Coop members do! — are more and more portrayed as frequenting a “terrorist” organization, and of being complicit in that organization’s “crimes”.

The word “terrorist” — like the phrase “hate speech” used to designate the words of those opposing the state of Israel’s policies — is so imprecise as to be undefinable. Who is a terrorist? Says who? What actually is “hate speech”?

Ronald Reagan once praised the terrorist death squads in Nicaragua known as “contras”, calling them “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” Say what? Oliver North secretly sold TOW missiles to Iran, he testified, and channelled that cash to fund the contras.

Reagan’s equation is instructive. Most of the founding fathers wereindeed terrorists. Just ask the American Indians. Or the slaves the founding fathers owned.

More and more events are portrayed as “terrorist attacks”. The last two years have recorded 350 “mass killings” in the U.S. Officially, mass killings are incidents in which 4 or more people are murdered. 300 of the perpetrators were Christian. Two were committed by people who said they were Moslems. Guess how many of the 350 mass killings are considered to be “terrorist-related”. (If you need a hint, you really should ratchet-up your critical thinking. Red Alert!)

“Terrorist” has become a word devoid of historical consistency. Why is Saddam Hussein but not Hillary Clinton seen as a terrorist, despite Clinton’s authorizing the bombing of Libya? Why isn’t Barack Obama’s targeting-by-drone considered “terrorism”, blowing up hospitals, schools, wedding parties?

The labeling of someone as “terrorist” or of being connected to a “terrorist” group is an opportunistic political ploy. Coop members who oppose Israel’s policies towards Palestinians are labeled “hate speakers” by Israel’s defenders in the Gazette; they risk being marginalized, losing their jobs and becoming targets of violent attack, so many stay quiet here.

Those maligning others as “using hate speech” are following the criminal Sheldon Adelson’s pro-Zionist playbook. Some are funded by front groups he’s set up for the purpose of casting aspersions on those (like me) who demand justice for Palestine, and for all people everywhere.

I hate the term “hate speech”. Like “terrorism”, it means whatever abusers of the language want it to mean. I like to think of Coop members as thwarters of mindless acquiescence to received doctrine. We are proud “Terra-ists”, part of the “Terra-ist International” out to save this planet. Look around the Coop. This is what terra-ists eat.

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by RICHARD LEVINS

with an into by Mitchel Cohen

With the indiscriminate spraying of toxic insecticides on the people of NY and the natural environment, this article — originally written in 1991 and updated in 1995 — becomes even more useful. In it, Richard Levins discusses, among other things, the use of ants and natural predators as a means to replace pesticides, based on experimental farms he and others established in Cuba throughout the 1980s. The details are fascinating, and my introduction locates this enterprise in its political context by examining what we mean by “natural”, and why the “Natural” is always a socio-political construct.

Richard Levins died on January 19, 2016.

He was the pre-eminent dialectical scientist, who taught the rest of our ecology and anti-imperialist movements. If you want to read what a dialectical inquiry looks like in practice, read The Dialectical Biologist by Levins and Lewontin. Dick Levins was a genius, a founder of Science for the People, and very supportive of the NY Marxist School and all of us younger activists (like me! ha!) over many years ….. In fact, the very first pamphlet the Red Balloon Collective published, on Agriculture in Cuba (below), was written by Levins — he’d originally written in the late 1980s a piece on Rosa Luxemburg and political struggles in the U.S. and Cuba, and I was so impressed with his footnotes — which were all about his real life experiences using ants in Cuba to protect crops from other insects — that I asked him if I could turn his footnotes into an essay and discard the rest! He said YES, we went back and forth painlessly a few times, and voila, a great pamphlet was born. Already missing Dick Levins!

An earlier version of this article appeared in Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. Mitchel, with Levin’s permission, edited and reworked it for Red Balloon Magazine (1992), and Richard Levins updated it for printing as a separate pamphlet in 1995. If you’d like a printed copy of that pamphlet, drop Mitchel a line at mitchelcohen@mindspring.com.

Introduction

Cyclones, Volcanoes, Crop Failures & Other “Natural” Disasters

By Mitchel Cohen

The cyclone that swept away more than 200,000 lives in Bangladesh in the early 1990s is hardly of consequence to most Americans, partly because it is seen as a “natural” tragedy over which we have no power. Says the left: “Nuthin’ we can do about it. Let’s talk about the war.”

“Thinking about ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ disasters gets complicated,” editorializes The Nation (June 3, 1991), “when there are so many tragedies to digest at the same time — not just Bangladesh and Kurdistan but also famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, earthquakes in Soviet Georgia and Costa Rica, cholera in Peru. Some no doubt still find refuge, like Pangloss when he contemplated the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in the thought that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Among humanitarian agencies, the phrase of the moment is donor fatigue: Americans, their consciences jarred and then numbed by bad news, have largely reacted by flipping the channel.

“Relief workers, politicians and editorialists will all agree that the best response to the cyclone in Bangladesh is not cure but prevention. That’s exactly the point. Those who died on the drowned islands and sandbars could have been saved by human decisions as conscious and controllable as those that unleashed the B 52s on Iraq or the Republican Guard on the Kurds.

“This is not a call to rehabilitate King Canute, who sat on the beach and ordered the waters to retreat; stilling the winds and waves remains beyond the reach of human science. But the roots of Bangladesh’s serial disasters are not hard to find. The floods that afflict the Ganges delta year after year are the direct result of the deforestation of the Indian Himalayas; topsoil is swept into the great river and causes it to burst its banks after the monsoon rains. The cyclone driven waves that roll in from the ocean can be blocked by coastal barriers. Or people can be protected by taking refuge in concrete shelters. Bangladesh has 300 of these shelters; almost every person who found one survived. But it needs 5,000.

“Whenever disaster strikes, the humanitarian relief agencies issue those familiar appeals that tell small donors what their dollars will buy. Help to Bangladesh’s food victims takes the form of plastic sheeting and water purification tablets, rice and molasses and intravenous drips. CARE says that $14 will purchase a ‘survival pack’ to support a family of four for five days.

“Here are some other ways of thinking about what larger donors might do with their money:

“$1.4 billion is the total that Bangladesh says it needs to mop up after this cyclone — while doing nothing to stop the next one, which will come as surely as the sunrise.

“These figures should not be a cause for fatigue but a spur to start saving lives.”

Twenty years ago, China (which we then called “Red China”) was able to detect a forthcoming earthquake not through elaborate technological devices but by closely observing the changed behavior of animals for several days before the quake; millions of lives were saved by preparation and quick communication.

The Chinese observation of animals to detect earthquakes is but one of many ways people devise all the time to empower themselves over the conditions that affect their lives. We in the U.S., on the other hand, are rapidly losing knowledge not only concerning “what to do” about particular problems, but whole ways of knowing, and we cede more and more authority for imagining life to a relatively few “representatives” trained in narrow technological approaches, at which they are expert. And it all seems so … well … natural.

But the more we learn about the forms of knowledge people around the world have used in living their lives, often under horribly adverse conditions, the more unnatural becomes our own slavish cringing in the U.S. before this system’s profit seeking high tech magic bullet MTV approach to everything, especially nature — which is only fitting since capitalism promotes itself as a “natural” — in fact, the only natural — economic system. (Hey, and how about that “organic” composition of capital?!)

Framed in that way, that which keeps us from imagining differently — say, different ways of detecting earthquakes, or non invasive pest control methods in growing food, or natural childbirths at home with the aid of midwives instead of the false sterility of fluorescent stirrupped on-your-back-hospitals — are not only scientific, but highly charged (in both senses of that term) political problems. The storms that devastated the Caribbean (1994) were integrally related to the decimation of the Brazilian rainforest and the new wind and moisture patterns the clearcutting caused — a political battle. The tuberculosis epidemic in New York City — a disease of poverty — is a direct result of the Koch administration’s gutting of preventive care in the 1980s — a political decision. As we undertake to free our minds from the dead weight of all the generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living, we can begin to imagine — and act to achieve — wholly different relationship to nature, to work, to each other, to our own bodies. As it turns out, today’s seemingly “natural” relationships not only have a cultural and scientific dimension to them but a political one as well.

But that remains conveniently hidden when we believe these forces to be “natural” and thus beyond our control. From the moment we come splashing into our very own blue or pink nuclear families — no! even before, in utero: the sounds the fetus senses, the rhythms, the food, the immune system’s antibodies; in that way, even the womb has a view — our daily lives, our very ways of framing the questions are drenched in politics, but we don’t see it as such. Instead, to account for the ways people interrelate and for the degrading and alienating conditions of daily life, we are inculcated with the false (and from the system’s vantage point, ideally self serving) idea that man [sic] is blessed with an inherently greedy, jealous, gender coded and selfish human nature; and we’re also taught to view attempts to counter greed, jealousy, sexual conditioning and selfishness as somehow hopelessly idealistic and na?e (unless we’re in a charitable mood, and we find them quaintly anachronistic, nostalgic and romantic — either way, disempowering) and therefore not worthy of our efforts … and certainly not political!

But, contrary to most of the Official Left’s tedious annual exhortations to subsidize Washington bound bus companies, revolutionary politics has little to do with the organized whining and begging that passes for protest against the slimy gyrations of sad eyed colonels in the lowlands of congress. Politics is about countering the ways we reproduce the dominant ways of seeing in our daily lives, the ways we relate, the metaphors through which we perceive the world, and the strategies we devise to fight back.

If oppression, exploitation, domination and greed are indeed natural, as most of us are taught, then so must be our helplessness before them. Thus, we become doubly victimized — first by the conditions we’re born into, which are maintained by the society around us, and second by their affect on our minds, shackling us to the dominant modes of conceptualizing and channeling our own potential, and preventing us from even conceiving of alternatives outside of the ruling class’ “ideological hegemony,” as they say in the old country — even during those heady moments when, with consciousness raised, we march to the barricades, fists flailing, hearts pounding, a song on our lips!

Recent anarchist and green pundits, too, are in danger of failing to imagine what hoops people are forced to jump through, and what happens to them when they refuse to jump. Especially when it comes to Cuba. Not only to imagine what could have been (and perhaps what could still be), in which case criticisms of various Cuban governmental policies, the hierarchy and the like would be very much apropos, but of what Cuba actually is: contested space where contradictory efforts and policies wash over it, back and forth, waves coming in and receding with the vast ocean surrounding it, a little island alone in a sea of capitalist sharks. It is no coincidence that it is in Cuba (as it was in Nicaragua when the Sandinista revolution was in full bloom), that most highly politicized of countries, that important ecological dreams are being born: its new solar energy manufacturing industry promises to become the cutting edge, especially for countries now dependent on expensive foreign oil, and explorations into new non intrusive agricultural techniques, producing quality foods at higher yields per acre without using pesticides, lift high the green vision of a different, non destructive relationship to nature, and are publicly funded and promoted. Should Cuba’s experiments in natural agriculture blossom, it will pose a threat to U.S. agribusiness, fertilizer, petroleum and other related industrial domination, for it imagines the possibility of countries, now caught up in the vicious cycle of producing cash crops for export while their own people go hungry, creating a way out of the IMF/World Bank “developmental” trap — the revolutionary implications of what is best in a green vision of an ecological world.

Many leftists, though, have bought into the U.S. government’s demonization of Cuba. The Greens’ Left Green Notes, for one, has printed vitriolic condemnations of Cuba for building a nuclear power plant that go far beyond any legitimate critique, while failing to offer a realistic alternative energy approach — proposals that would be welcomed by most Cuban agencies, some quite independent from the national government, who are eager for skilled international input. Fortunately, revolutionary scientists like Richard Levins and others have been working steadily in Cuba to put into effect just such a vision, and the following essay sketches some of that work. Anarchists, marxists, socialist feminists and greens (O my!) need to move beyond the academic critiques we’re so good at from afar and offer coherent alternatives, working with others to put them into practice, by helping to form communities of resistance and nurturance that alone can give rise to and sustain the required struggles over long periods of time. Had we been able to work more closely with revolutionaries in India and prevented the deforestation of the Himalayas, with indigenous people in the Amazon and saved the rainforest, the regular flooding of the Ganges river and the storms that tear through the Caribbean with such devastation — and all the consequent loss of life — could have been avoided. Had we even been able to construct cyclone shelters in Bangladesh, or prevented the U.S. bombardment of Iraq — all of which involve a political dimension that too many ecology minded people shun — hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, and horrible “natural” catastrophes averted. When we fail to take direct action to build up the kind of world we can only occasionally imagine, we allow the ruling class, and particularly Western science, to purse its profits with our lips, and spin its final solutions out of our golden desires.

As Richard Levins writes in the following essay, solidarity with the Cuban revolution does not mean passive endorsement of all present conditions and practices in Cuba, but an active, critical and supportive engagement with (and through) the revolutionary process. Through that engagement, we’ll find suprising new ways of framing the questions that will not only help the Cuban people but generate conditions that enable us to liberate ourselves! Radical ecologists, greens, must support and involve ourselves in the experimental agriculture and alternative energy projects going on in Cuba, and keep U.S. imperialism out of there, for it is in such communities that our hopes for a new relationship to nature and an ecological future are being worked out and made to yield fruitful harvests.

– Mitchel Cohen, 1995

The Struggle for Ecological Agriculture in Cuba

By Richard Levins

Richard Levins, who died last week, was a professor of Biology at Harvard University who continued to work extensively in Cuba and who, with Richard Lewontin, is the author of The Dialectical Biologist (Harvard University Press, 1985).

A quarter of a century after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, pesticides remain a serious hazard to our health, agricultural production and the environment in general. In some parts of the world, pesticide use is increasing and still regarded as an index of progress, while in a few places the expansion of chemical pest control has been stopped or even reversed.

I have followed and participated in the struggle for an ecological agriculture in Cuba since 1964. It is a struggle: science is not the smooth illumination of darkness by light, or a natural process of the unfolding of knowledge. It involves conflicts over priorities, uncertainties about what is necessary or possible, disagreements among different outlooks — in a word, politics.

For a society like Cuba’s, poor but bent on eradicating poverty, there exists an urgency to increase production, sometimes in just a matter of months. Under such circumstances, and especially in the face of uncertainty that accompanies agricultural production, neither farmers nor planners can afford the risks — mass starvation, disease, and dislocation — of switching to new technologies. Nor do they have the resources or the time to conduct the research necessary to develop alternative, ecologically sound production methods.

Additionally, throughout the Third World there is ignorance of the dangers of a chemicalized agriculture and of the existence of alternatives. But ignorance is not the passive absence of knowledge. It is structured into a belief system with areas of information, misinformation, and lack of information that allow people to be dazzled by the promises of progress and blind to its seamy side. In the Third World, this ignorance is organized around the ideology of “developmentalism.” [See “The Debt Crisis: Africa and the New Enclosures,” by Silvia Federici, also in the Winter/Spring 1992 issue of Red Balloon Magazine].

Consequently, in many areas of the world there are no alternative networks able to compete with the chemical industry’s sales efforts. And even planners and administrators with a strong commitment to serving the people can be so preoccupied with production and costs that they leave themselves vulnerable to the sales efforts of the chemical industry that promise quick fixes to long term problems. These forces are pushing their poisons throughout the world; Cuba is one of the few countries in which it may be possible to break that chain in the immediate future, if circumstances (and the U.S.) allow it.

What A Difference A Revolution Makes: Formation Of The Cuban Ecology Movement

The first major factor in the shift toward ecological agriculture in Cuba was the growth, maturity and self confidence of an articulate community of ecologists enjoying public support. Popular interest in ecology was growing. The press carried articles on biological pest management, Jorge Ramon’s wildlife program appeared on television for many years, and amateur groups like the Speleological Society and associations of amateur botanists were part of a national commitment to science and development growing out of the post revolutionary enthusiasm for the nation’s own plants and animals, which seems to accompany the winning of national independence in all countries.

As in most colonial and post colonial societies, Cuban biology was dominated by systematic biology (the description and classification of plants and animals), medicine, (1) and agriculture.(2) In 1959, the revolution brought a strong commitment to science but scarce means for acting on that commitment. Cuba’s small group of systematic zoologists, botanists, and biogeographers (3) felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task of describing the biota of Cuba and its geographic distribution before new economic development would alter the habitats beyond recognition. Although there was interest in ecology and evolutionary biology, there was a strong sense that description must precede experimentation. Instructors did not feel capable of teaching in these areas and the library lacked books and journals.(4)

The International Biological Program was a major turning point for Cuban ecology. UNESCO sponsored intensive long term biome studies around the world through the “Man and the Biosphere” projects.(5) Cuba’s contribution was a study of the montane rainforest in the Sierra del Rosario.(6) Collaboration with the Polish and Czech academies of science and individuals from other countries created an international environment within which Cuban botanists and a few zoologists emerged as ecologists. The rainforest project paralleled a reforestation program which included monoculture and clear cutting. As a result, the Institute of Botany came into conflict with the foresters around the ecological irrationality of the scheme, its first foray into ecological policy questions.

At the site of the old Agricultural Experiment Station, the National Institute for Fundamental Research in Tropical Agriculture (INIFAT) was organized. In the new institute, research projects were chosen for both their practical importance and their value in training biologists.(7) Other ecology minded researchers promoted biological control in the Instituto Nacional de Sanidad Vegetal and laboratories of the citrus subministry. In 1980, at the first national ecology meeting, it became clear that ecological interests were emerging in biology, plant protection, fisheries, the tourist industry, and even the food industry.(8)

During the meetings, erosion and deforestation were identified as the major ecological problems, but pollution was expected to increase in importance.(9) In 1987, the Institutes of Botany and Zoology merged to form the Institute of Ecology and Systematics of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, and the first international symposium on these topics was held in Havana in 1988. Ecology was now a respected and legitimate branch of biology with public visibility.

There is now a growing ecological movement in Cuba. But it is not an ecological movement in the sense of those in Europe or North America. It is not a distinct political movement such as the Greens, nor is it an opposition movement confronting a resistant government and corporations; nor is it yet an “official” movement of the sort set up by governments to say yes. Cuban ecology activists are political, committed revolutionaries who see their struggles for ecologically sound policies as part of the duty of communists in building a new society with its own relation to nature.(10)

In their view, ignorance, developmentalism and economic urgency are their main adversaries. But unlike the situation in the United States where vested interests prevent alternative “development” because it threatens profits, the problem in Cuba is not a systematic drive towards chemicalizing agriculture for profit, nor lack of channels for expression, but resistance from developmental ideas which still hold sway. In one stunning recent victory for ecologists, the planning board of Havana has begun to set aside land for restoring mangroves — a hotly contested proposal over the years because of the needs of other sectors. (The government had encouraged “development” along the coast in order to promote tourism and obtain desperately needed foreign exchange, which could have ruined the offshore cays. Recently, however, one section of the stone causeways built to an offshore cay for tourism development was torn up and replaced with a bridge span after ecologists argued that it would harm the mangroves by interfering with the circulation of water.) Similarly, where substandard housing is being demolished in areas of old Havana, they are being replaced by parks, and new housing will be built elsewhere. In the absence of greed as a major interest to be overcome, discussions are not confrontational in the same way as they are in the U.S., and the honest clash of ideas towards common goals replaces the purchased loyalty of privatized industry’s public relations firms and grant agency scientists.

Higher oil prices and the collapse of its trading partners in eastern Europe have forced the Cuban government to promote energy conservation measures that will cut state energy expenditures by half and private use by 33 percent, as well as alternatives to reliance on foreign non renewable energy sources. The government has already imported hundreds of thousands of bicycles from China to replace reliance on costly automobiles, and farmers have also recently introduced oxen to replace some tractors. In addition to saving on fuel, oxen are better for the soil and their use encourages integrated field crop and pasture. Most daily papers have gone to weekly schedules to conserve paper and energy, and the precarious economic circumstances have even forced some of them to suspend publication. All enterprises have been cutting back on staff, especially on administration. But unlike in the U.S., people left without work are given alternative jobs, retrained at government expense, or receive unemployment insurance at 70 percent of previous wage. And a new industry centered around the manufacture of solar energy devices, which are required on all new construction in Cuba, holds some promise for the future.

The need to economize on foreign exchange, combined with the growing sophistication of the ecological community, has also been a major incentive for the government to seek non chemical pest management strategies. Although natural pest deterrence and control was already being used in a number of areas, ecologists needed dramatic successes to convince the Cuban government to put a major effort into ecological pest management. The first successes came with ants; many of them proved to be voracious predators of agriculture pests. The species Pheidole megacephala is especially versatile in reducing the costs of pest management of a number of crops.

One example: The beetle Cylas formicarius causes significant damage by boring into sweet potatoes while they are forming. Pheidole can form colonies around the sweet potato itself; if the ants get there first they keep the beetles away.

But since Pheidole does not tolerate direct sunlight very well, nests have to be planted in the field after the vines have grown for about 45 days and produced sufficient shade. So the ants are cultivated in pieces of banana stalk and set out into the field at the rate of nine nests per hectare. Even with the labor of propagating and caring for the ants this system of biological pest management cut in half the direct costs of protection. And in bananas, the ants provided long lasting protection compared to chemical methods, which had to be repeated every few weeks.

As the benevolent role of ants became widely known, the recognition of the possibilities of biological methods increased. Cuba now has 14 centers for ant production, probably the only place in the world where ants are propagated for pest management.

The ant project began through a convergence of two independent pathways. I had been agitating for the use of ants because my own studies in the theory of ecosystems convinced me that generalized predators such as ants could play an important role as a first line of defense against pests.(11)

Meanwhile, people at INIFAT were looking for methods of retarding the almost inevitable decline of banana production in old plantations. Across the road from one of INIFAT’s experimental stations was a private farm which had been able to sustain high yields for some 20 years. The farmer did not know why he had this success except that he never had allowed entomologists onto his property with sprayers. A brief investigation revealed the presence of Tetramorium ant nests at the base of each banana plant, protecting them from insect larvae of many kinds, an observation later quantified by Juan Torres working in Puerto Rico.

The success with ants has made it clear that ecological criticism of pesticides was more than a theoretical critique; it could be turned into explicit practice, and in a reasonable amount of time.

Three years ago, the Ministry of Agriculture adopted biological pest control as one of its national priorities for the new five year plan, which included the expansion of the present pesticide free areas by about 30 percent. As a result, the Hermanos Nuñez farm in Pinar del Rio, for instance, is raising earthworms for humus for itself and other farms. The beds lie under a light shade of palms where ants are being raised. The farm also recycles pig residues to feed geese, goose residues to fertilize the pond, and fish residues to enrich the feed for pigs. In addition, they are experimenting with free running native chickens as an alternative to factory style poultry production. Under the national plan, citrus will shift completely to natural control over the five years. As of 1990, 15 percent of the non sugar cane farm land was already under natural control. And in sugar, no insecticides are used, although herbicides are still standard practice.

There are currently four major programs for biological control: the use of ants in bananas and sweet potatoes; the use of trap crops such as corn to divert fruit worms from peppers; the application of Bacillus thuringiensis in vegetable crops; and the cultivation of the parasitic wasp Trichograma on an artesanal scale on farms throughout the country. (12)

In addition, there is active experimentation with fungi, nematodes, wasps, and ants for pest control and at a citrus farm we are designing an ecosystem for multipurpose use. The program includes the selection of plants to improve organic matter in the soil, house beneficial predators and pathogens, attract wasps to nectar sources, fix nitrogen, and increase the rate of decomposition of citrus leaf litter in order to interrupt the life cycle of the greasy spot fungus disease and for other purposes. Local farmers, both individually and cooperatively, have been eager to adopt methods which avoid pesticides; on their own, they have developed innovative techniques for testing additional predator species.

Cuba’s Commitment To Social Benefit

We know from the dismal environmental conditions of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that socialism [or what has attempted to pass for it — ed.] is certainly no guarantee of ecological approaches and that the advantages of social planning can be overwhelmed by other factors. Indeed, they were overwhelmed in Cuba, also, during the first decades of the revolution.

But today several aspects of the socialist organization of Cuban society favor ecological rationality. First, there is no strong commercial interest in selling pesticides. This is not entirely absent, since Cuba is part of a world capitalist economy and foreign producers would like to sell more pesticides to Cuba. But, unlike other countries, Cuban government officials do not invest in the import business, nor do they have other personal economic interests in purchasing pesticides.

Second, commitment to planned development for the benefit of the whole society means that the health impact of a technology and its effect on the environment cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. Awareness of pesticide toxicity has not only led to health protection measures for farmworkers, but has also empowered the Ministry of Health to have a voice in pesticide policy. And in response to demands from ecologists, the National Commission for Natural Resources and the Environment (COMARNA) has been elevated from an organ of the Academy of Sciences to cabinet level.

With economic concerns pressuring Cuba, the need to protect the 30 percent of Cuban secondary school students who attend schools in the countryside from pesticide exposure becomes increasingly prohibitive. Unlike in the United States, where environmental degradation and health costs are not included in the costs of production that generates them, in Cuba the health related expenses caused by chemical methods in agriculture, and the need to protect people from the dangers, are figured into the composite social cost and weigh heavily in all cost/benefit analyses. There was never any question of ignoring the health impacts of pesticides, so that these issues became part of the balance sheet from the start.

Third, large scale socialist agriculture allows for coherent land use patterns that benefit the whole society, including the adoption of ecological pest management strategies. It may seem that large scale production is inimical to ecological sensitivity to local conditions and to the imperative for diversity. Indeed, in capitalist societies this is all too often the case; but for societies that have rejected economic cutthroat competition between producing units — and with it the systemic drive towards monocultures, maximizing profits, and mechanization (run on non renewable fuels) — large scale planning can implement programs of natural pest control over a large enough area to be effective.(13)

Here’s an example: In capitalist agriculture it would be extremely difficult to get some farmers to forego planting their most lucrative crop (and relinquish their competitive edge) in order to create gaps in its distribution, which would slow down the spread of pests. Nor would they volunteer to grow guavas instead of citrus so that some pests can be sustained on guavas all year round, thus maintaining a permanent reservoir of food for predators which would then move over to the citrus when the pest population increases after the spring rains. With large scale planning in a socialist society, however, such a program of natural pest control can be extremely effective precisely because there is no systemic push toward monoculture. The unit of planning must be large enough to allow precisely for the integration of diverse conditions,(14) while the unit of production will be much smaller and reflect the need for mosaic, alley, and polyculture patterns.

Sugar And Foreign Exchange

The sugar industry, however, is a special case. Because of its importance in the Cuban economy, sugar is under a separate ministry from the rest of agriculture. This is certainly an impediment to mixed farming enterprises. The future of sugar in Cuba depends on a number of factors. Sugar is still a major source of foreign exchange for an economy that badly needs it. But prices have been falling and future markets are uncertain. Cuban planners are coming to see sugar, increasingly, as a raw material for industry, including paper, chemical, fuel, and feed for cattle. As the crisis deepens, alternative sources for cloth, such as hemp, are also being developed.

The sugar cane plant is still one of the most effective solar energy collectors we know. It is expected that the industrial products of sugar will gradually replace raw sugar as a prime contributor to Cuban foreign commerce. However, this will create new problems. The very efficient use of the whole cane plant for fuel in the mills as well as for sugar means that there will be less residue left in the field. Therefore, more fertilizer will be required, and under present conditions the best source will be nitrogen fixing plants. This would encourage a step toward diversification through crop rotation.

The same pest control ecologists who work in other branches of agriculture also attend to sugar. Insecticides have never been used extensively in sugar cane, and new problems are being approached ecologically. On one Cuban cooperative farm, a bale of hay recently fell off a truck along a road next to a cane field. Ants living in the hay invaded the cane and within a few months have cleaned the sugar cane borer from several hectares. The ant is now being propagated deliberately by the cooperative. I expect the ecological methods of pest control can be introduced easily into cane, but that the diversification of sugar land use will require more fundamental changes in the planning of agriculture.

Finally, national planning of research makes it possible to establish priorities for ecologically sound pest management and thus to allocate limited resources where they are most needed.

These general favorable factors have been reinforced by recent economic events. Unequal exchange, the disparity between the prices of industrial products that Cuba imports and the agricultural produce that is exported, has been growing in recent years and can be expected to increase even further as Cuba’s major trading partners adopt world (capitalist) price structures as the standard for their own commerce. The problem of the balance of payments has become especially urgent in the last few years and is perhaps the decisive influence making economists receptive to ecologists. Thus, both the long term structure of the economy and the economic constraints of the world recession are acting in phase, for the time being, to encourage biological control of pests and ecological approaches to agriculture.

These factors do not guarantee rational environmental behavior, however. The desperation to produce, whether to maximize profits or to eliminate scarcity, can, and often has, overwhelmed broader and more long term considerations. Administrators whose success will be evaluated by production or profits may be afraid to try something new — especially measures such as refraining from spraying, a crucial factor in allowing wasps, which feed on many pests, to return. But the society’s political and ideological commitment to seeing the whole and working for social benefit makes it possible to win victories by discussion and education, unencumbered by having to bang up against resistance from the system’s fundamental economic interests as well.

The Shift Toward The Left

In recent years, there has been a general leftward shift in Cuban politics that has contributed to the development of ecological rationality in agriculture, whereas most “socialist” countries have adopted rightist “solutions” to the stagnation and alienation created by their command economies and bureaucratic states, including:

the promotion of private economic initiatives;

management of public enterprises based on the same criteria — profitability — as capitalist firms;

adopting capitalist forms of organization and job definition;

conventional approaches to science and learning;

reliance on the old motivations, such as private marketing of produce and other personal economic incentives;

a managerial technocratic approach to development;

reliance on experts;

putting of economics in command;

acceptance of national chauvinism and sexism as well as environmental destruction — all in the name of progress.

Cuba has, in many ways, gone against the recent trends and has challenged capitalist ways of doing things. Instead of giving in to the market pressures, it has innovated new forms of organization to resist them, emphasizing collective and social motivations through which people empower themselves and gain their own expertise, aspire to change human relations, and place politics, not economics, in command.

The resurgence of the leftward trend in Cuba began in the late 1980s. It is referred to as “rectification” and, especially utilizing the ideas of Che Guevara, includes:

1) Exposure of corruption and bureaucratic behavior at all levels of society;

2) Criticism of “economism,” the reliance on capitalist type incentives for production. This includes: restriction on the private marketing of agricultural produce; criticism of the practice of using excessive bonuses to achieve fulfillment of production goals; an appeal to administrators not to look only at meeting production goals but also at how their decisions affect the whole socialist process; revival of the microbrigades (construction brigades recruited from different enterprises to build housing, daycare centers, family doctor clinics and other social construction); the popularization of Ernesto Che Guevara’s economic ideas (including multioficio, the practice of having people do whatever is necessary rather than being confined within a narrow job definition and consagracion, or dedication to one’s job); and reinforcement of egalitarian values with increases in the minimum wage;

3) A general increase in criticism at public meetings and conventions, such as the secondary school students’ federation, the Communist youth, teachers’ meetings, etc.;

The leftward trend favors an ecological approach to agriculture because it encourages looking at the whole picture rather than narrow economistic goals, criticizes narrow specialization and encourages initiatives. Municipal governments have even been encouraged to develop systems of municipal gardens, where the objective is continuous year round production of a diverse range of vegetable crops. Indeed, in following up on suggestions by ecologists, the food program now requires each province to be as self sufficient as possible in food as a protection against the uncertainties of weather. Each farm is also encouraged, at the very least, to supply its own lunchroom.

This decentralized approach favors widespread innovation and polyculture, and the overall political direction provides a counterweight to the pressures of the world market which makes earning or saving foreign exchange a top priority.

Countertendencies, and the Relationship of Ideology and Material Conditions

But there remains a strong developmentalist current, too. Its major tenet is that progress, including technological progress, proceeds along a single axis from less developed to more developed. Therefore, the task of the less developed is to adopt, adapt, and even surpass the “advanced” countries along this axis using the same technology and basing themselves on the same science.

Such naïve “progressivism” has become part of some marxist traditions, in which science and technology are viewed as “objective” processes, outside of human control and free of class content.

They are seen as essential to generic human progress and needed to solve the major issues of production and society through the expansion of production — especially of cash crops — to meet world market needs and generate foreign exchange which can then be, so they argue, reinvested. This becomes a top priority in a technocratic view of development and social change.

The major elements of developmentalist beliefs in agriculture are: 1) Labor intensive agriculture is backward, capital intensive is modern; 2) Diversity is backward, uniform monoculture is modern; 3) Small scale production is backward, large scale is modern; 4) Subjection to nature is backward, an increasingly complete control over everything that happens in the field or orchard or pasture is modern; 5) Folk knowledge is backward, scientific “expertise” is modern; 6) Generalists are backward, specialists are modern; 7) The smaller the object of study (a reductionist approach), the more modern the investigation.

Determinism and Freedom

Although this outlook is criticized by many marxists as economistic, it nevertheless arises again and again under urgent pressure to meet a country’s consumption needs, and it is often the dominant current where Communist parties are in power.

This sense of urgency is paradoxical. On the one hand, it emphasizes the backwardness and lack of choice of the society struggling to survive in a hostile world. On the other hand, it manifests a tremendous confidence that “we can do anything,” including avoiding the pitfalls of adopting the products of capitalist progress without suffering the same destructive impacts.

Those of us who oppose developmentalism start from an emphasis on the wholeness, historicity and contradictoriness of the world — key components of a truly dialectical materialist analysis. “Science” is not an “objective process outside of human control and free of class content” but is a social process, an instance of the division of labor in which activity aimed at organizing experience for the purpose of finding out is separated from other labor. It is given institutional form (the University, research facilities and corporate think tanks); it develops its own tools (reductionist science); and it adapts its own self conscious ideology from the prevailing ideologies of the broader society (change comes through the management of technocratic and academic elites).

The development of science and technology is the result of a strong interaction between the social structure as a whole, the condition of science, and the natural objects it attempts to study. Therefore, there is not any one inevitable and necessary pathway for the development of science and technology. We are not limited to a choice between stagnation and the high tech pathway that has prevailed over the last half century. We are not predetermined to take the technocratic road. But there are conditions that need to exist, and be strengthened, for that free choice to be possible.

The ‘Greening’ of Socialism in Cuba

Marxists, greens, and other radicals need to approach science differently; for a long time now, as pointed out earlier, science has been seen to be independent of class forces and as an objective force standing outside of human control, and therefore outside of history. We need to begin to see the particular form of conventional agricultural science in its historical context — as the convergence of the commodification of knowledge, the needs of agribusiness, and the dominant reductionist philosophy of science, which sees problems as fundamentally separable and soluble by independent “magic bullets.”

In an agricultural context, developmentalism, in Cuba, is being challenged in many areas:

First, the present high tech, specialized agriculture is a transient developmental stage which fairly rapidly undermines its own productive base through soil depletion, erosion, compaction, salinization, loss of diversity, and the creation of new pest problems. It increases vulnerability to natural and economic disasters and harms the health of the agricultural workers and eventually the whole society and the rest of nature. In capitalist countries, this developmental stage increases class differentiation and undermines the status of women because access to the new technologies is available only to those who can afford it, generally men.

Its successor should be a gentle and thought and knowledge intensive technology that nudges rather than bludgeons nature.(15) This technology makes use of minimum inputs, depending as much as possible on processes already at work in the land:

Instead of choosing irrigation as the best way to moisten soil, it first looks to how to increase the moisture holding capacity of the soil.

Before building dams it considers forests as the best reservoirs.

Before relying on chemical fertilizer it looks to improvement of the soil.

The search for new commodity inputs to sell farmers must be subordinated to the design of agroecosystems that are as self operating as possible.

Second, the spatial patterning of agriculture should be neither the random diversity of the minifundia as determined by land tenure nor the homogeneity of agribusiness, but a mosaic of planned heterogeneity on different scales. This will allow for a more or less uniform need for labor throughout the year, provide products for local consumption as well as for the market, take advantage of the existing variability of the land in soil, exposure and topography, and allow for advantageous agronomic and microclimatic interactions of different kinds of plants and their associated faunas. Among the important interactions are the effects of plants on wind (which thereby modulate the microclimate to a distance of about ten times their height), weed suppression, changes in soil texture depending on the pattern of root formation, retarding erosion, fixation of nitrogen by legumes, accumulation of organic matter, attraction of pests’ natural enemies to sources of nectar and nesting sites, and the confusion, diversion or repulsion of pests.

Alley farming is one way to get the benefits of scale and mechanization but also the interactions between adjacent plots. Strips of crop are long enough to make mechanization feasible and useful but of a width that both allows for machinery and for interactions between crops. Polyculture provides advantages for pest control and soil improvement as well as a hedge against climatic uncertainty. And, on a larger scale, the land use pattern can include non agricultural formations which preserve natural diversity, store water, prevent erosion, modulate climate, and serve as reservoirs for beneficial wildlife. The integration of field crops, pasture and forestry allows for strong recycling pathways.

Third, we distinguish between the unit of production and the unit of planning. The unit of production should be small enough to take advantage of the microclimate heterogeneity of a farm and permit interactions between habitats while being large enough to take advantage of the economies of scale. But the whole patchwork of plots should be coordinated to allow for the management of even highly mobile pests, the recycling of residues among field, orchard and pasture, and the coordination of many different operations. The subunits allow for a detailed intimate knowledge of very local conditions while the whole enterprise allows their fitting together in the service of larger societal goals.

Fourth, we recognize that nature is inherently variable. That variability is harmful if we have very narrowly prescribed targets, but an advantage when we learn to ride with it. For example, small temperature differences can alter drastically the synchrony of populations of pests, their host plants, and their predators. If we depend for plant protection on a single predator or parasite it becomes necessary to monitor the microclimate quite precisely. But if we build an insect community of many species, when one does poorly another does better and we can achieve crop protection without controlling the complex dynamics of all the interacting species. In the face of uncertainty we can select ensembles of crops for their tolerance to change and use diversity as a buffer against the unexpected.

Fifth, the gentler the technology, the more site specific it has to be. The adaptation of a technology suited to every microsite is beyond the capacity of even the most affluent extension service. Rather, the technology has to be developed on the farm through a collaboration of the farmers who have a detailed, intimate, local knowledge of their own circumstances and the off farm scientists who can provide the general, theoretically based and abstract knowledge that requires some distancing from the particular. This interaction is only possible when the parties meet on terms of equality and mutual respect. In class divided societies this is extremely difficult to achieve. In Cuba, the fact that many of the agricultural scientists come from peasant backgrounds makes it easier.(16)

Sixth, many of the most dramatic failures of agricultural or public health or development programs have come about not because of a failure to know the details about the parts of the system but because of a failure to look at the whole. Each specialist invents a contribution which works given the results of the other specialists: engineers design machines for monoculture because agronomists recommend monoculture because the varieties have been selected for their performance in monoculture because that is how farmers plant because the machines are designed. … Each party makes choices that seem rational given the choices the others made so that the whole process gives the appearance of necessity and inevitability. What we are seeing in reality is a contradiction between the growing rationlity in the particular and the irrationality of the enterprise as a whole. Therefore, it is essential to place specialized knowledge into a broader context where we are aware of its source and limitations and always look at the whole.

Finally, the enthusiasm for genetic engineering has reinforced the reductionist bias which sees molecules as more basic than cells which are more basic than organisms which are more basic than populations which are more basic than ecosystems. The term “modern biology” is used to refer to molecular biology, ignoring modern systematics, population genetics, ecology, bioclimatology, etc. Yet the processes on the level of populations and communities determine directly the outcomes of interest to us and are not deducible from the behaviors of their components. Whole system study is the weakest area of agricultural science and must become a top priority.

These arguments are derived from a dialectical materialist marxist approach to science in general and agricultural science in particular. This does not mean that they can only be reached in that way. Some of the same conclusions have been reached by others from different perspectives. But they are easier to reach from a point of view which self consciously calls attention to complexity, process, historicity and contradiction. Nevertheless, the phrase “are derived from” does not mean “arise spontaneously or receive unanimous welcome.” They are a particular reading of marxism which has to confront the developmentalist interpretations.

Conclusion

The struggle for an ecologically sound agriculture is not over in Cuba but progress is being made. This came about through the convergence of several lines of causation: the maturing of the community of ecologists and of worldwide ecological mass movements, the economic pressures to reduce imports, the demonstrated success of several biological pest management programs, the political shift towards the left in the last few years, and active educational campaigns by particular individuals creating both a public awareness of ecological issues and building support within the research institutions and the Ministry of Agriculture.

All of this happened against a background of a socialist economy in which there is no profit oriented chemical industry pushing pesticides, and in which the conscious goal of planning is a better, more abundant and healthier life. Difficulties arise when intermediate goals towards these ends take on a life of their own, become the measure of an enterprise’s contribution to society, and seem to conflict with the long term goals. Although socialism is all too obviously no guarantee that intermediate goals will not obstruct ecological wisdom, it does practically eliminate vested economic interest in perpetuating harmful practices. Therefore, a debate over technological directions is only an argument, a confrontation of opposing beliefs, but not a confrontation of opposing interests.

This gives a different feel to argument even against stubborn ignorance. It makes strong argument effective and makes convincing the other party more important than the simple exercise of power. It also affects the style of the struggle, which starts from the premise of comrades struggling with each other for a shared goal and is more educational than oppositional.

My own participation has been exclusively through a battle of ideas. I hold no power at all in Cuba (or in the United States, for that matter). Yet, when I raised criticisms of particular projects, those who disagreed with me thought it necessary to attempt to convince me of their position, urging that I visit the sites, and discussed the issues at length. The debate also takes place within a marxist theoretical framework, with its emphasis on the historical contingency of science and technology, the importance of looking at the whole, and the recognition of complexity, process and contradiction. This provides the tools for challenging technocratic developmentalist assumptions.

At a time when ecological issues are becoming major political concerns throughout the world, the Cuban struggle should be watched closely and actively supported. The different texture of the struggle in Cuba from that in capitalist countries reveals the intensely political character of human ecology. Its victories under difficult circumstances show just a little of the potential of socialism and of marxism in negotiating a new relation with nature. If it can keep the U.S. and market forces from skewing its socialist development, Cuba may yet be able to overcome some of its contradictions, destructive residues of previous stages of development, and the commandist state form that has plagued all of the so called “socialist” countries; Cuba can become a world ecological power as well as a medical one. Therefore, Cuban ecology needs allies.

Allies of Cuban ecology can support this struggle for ecological rationality in two main ways. Some of us can participate directly by helping the development of Cuban science, providing scientific information that opens up alternative pathways, participating in Cuban scientific meetings, subscribing to scientific journals for the Cuban Academy of Sciences, ordering Cuban journals and, in general, breaking the blockade.

All of us can help by working against the political and economic pressures the United States is applying against Cuba. These pressures reinforce the urgencies that promote short sighted developmentalism and thwart efforts to insist on the big picture and the long horizon. Solidarity with the Cuban revolution does not mean passive endorsement of all present conditions and practices in Cuba but an active, critical and supportive engagement with (and through) the revolutionary process.

———————————————-NOTES

Systematics and medicine were possible because they were low cost fields in which individuals could work in relative isolation. And indeed there were outstanding researchers such as Carlos Finlay in infectious diseases and Filipe Poey in systematic biology. Foreign biologists also used Cuba as a field site, enriching the museums of Spain and the United States but without creating an indigenous scientific community.

The agricultural experiment station was established by the sugar producers in the early years of this century to serve their industry. Although individual staff members attempted to direct the research agenda more toward Cuban needs, their efforts were limited by the agenda of the administrators, corruption and lack of resources.

The availability of biologists had been reduced by the emigration of opponents of the new government and by the recruitment of some of its enthusiastic supporters into the tasks of organizing science instead of doing research.

Under these conditions, my advocacy of advanced work in ecology and population biology probably made more stark the contrast between what was necessary and what was possible.

A biome is an ecological formation such as rain forest, long grass prairie or desert.

The first results of the use of ants for pest control were obtained at INIFAT, working with Tetramorium bicarinatum as a protector of bananas, as discussed later.

Representatives of polluting industries came to call the attention of ecologists to the pollution they were causing with the piles of husks beside the rice mills and fruit pits where juices were being canned or bottled. They asked for help from ecologists in ameliorating the impact. This was a unique experience for me, since in the United States the representatives of industry play a quite different role in such discussions.

The criticism of pesticide use was raised several times but also resisted by a plant protection station staffperson who argued that pesticides could not be all bad since the Soviet Union produced them.

Some struggles will be more difficult than others. Cuba’s dependence on imported oil makes arguing against nuclear energy more difficult. And the crucial economic role of sugar and its institutionalization in a separate ministry will make the shift to multipurpose farming in the sugar areas more traumatic.

Unlike the more specialized parasitoids, their populations can be maintained even in the absence of the pests we want to control so that they do not lag behind the pest in an outbreak. Ants have another special property: more than one possible community of ants can live in a particular place since the outcome of ant competition depends in part on the age of the colonies, on which got there first. Therefore, if we could introduce ants to a habitat they are capable of occupying, they could maintain themselves in the face of later invasions. Aside from all theoretical arguments, I confess to a special affection for ants which attracted my attention to their practical possibilities and added enthusiasm to my advocacy.

Artesanal as in artisan, small scale craft production rather than industrial.

While relatively immobile pests such as mites and scales can sometimes be controlled on the scale of a single tree, the highly mobile secondary pests (pests that emerged as problems because previous pesticide use destroyed their natural controls, a kind of agricultural iatrogenesis — the provocation of disease by physicians — present a different sort of problem. A moth lays eggs on a plant and the emerging caterpillars eat the leaves, moult, and emerge as moths which fly away. Next year’s pests will not be the offspring of moths from a particular small area but from the whole region. Therefore, the killing of the moths after they have emerged does not protect a small farm. But on a large scale, such measures can reduce the population of pests for the region. This allows additional options for pest control such as the use of birds and bats whose area of activity is relatively large scale.

Eighty percent of Cuban farm land is divided into 400 large state farms. Some three quarters of the remaining land is organized into cooperatives. The small number of enterprises is an advantage for the extension activities of researchers. Fifty one local centers of plant protection service an average of eight state farms each, meet with the cooperatives and individual farmers and cooperate with the small farmers’ association (ANAP) in promoting more suitable methods.

There is nothing romantic or sentimental about the notion of a gentle technology even after George Bush gave gentleness a bad name. Whereas 19th century thermodynamic technologies romanticized the employment of vast quantities of energy to move vast amounts of matter, modern scientific interest emphasizes information, the achievement of big effects with small efforts. The energy of a nerve impulse or the mass of hormone molecules are trivial compared to their impacts. The same applies to ecological management.

In our citrus project on a large state farm, work is being done by scientists from Havana, the science staff of the farm, and secondary school students in an ecology interest circle. We maintain close contact with the state farms and cooperatives, as well as the private sector, networks of innovators meet regularly and cooperatives usually have a member assigned for liaison with scientists.

by MITCHEL COHEN

I wrote this story ten days ago and it was published in the Queens Free Press, which is edited by Joel Kuszai, a professor at Queens Community College. Since that time, additional information was published by columnist Juan Gonzalez, whose article on Ron McGuire appeared in today’s New York Daily News, and by civil rights attorney Bill Simpich in ReaderSupportedNews (RSN), which added a great deal of background to Ron McGuire’s story as an activist, before he became a lawyer.

As this battle picks up steam to defend the attorney who defended the students in the City University of New York system, the courts as well as the de Blasio administration will be deciding this matter’s fate. I urge you to contact your local press and the Mayor’s office and City Council members in support of Ron McGuire. This case may seem on the surface like it’s only about a lawyer trying to recover funds from the City, but there’s really a lot more that’s at stake. As Juan Gonzalez accurately puts it,

“If lawyers like McGuire can’t receive adequate compensation for defending the rights of low-income students, then no one else will even try.”

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BY RICHARD GREEMAN

The fear that is gripping France today stands in ghastly contrast with the positive national mood during the days immediately following the horrific Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. (See my report, “France at War.”)

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Thirty years ago I wrote this essay. I solicit your feedback on how the same patterns used then — Secretary of State Alexander Haig‘s holding-up for the cameras of falsified photographs (which was itself a repeat of Sen. Joe McCarthy‘s use of cropped photos in the Army-McCarthy televised hearings in 1954, as shown in the great documentary, “Point of Order”), were repeated by Colin Powell in his televised testimony to the United Nations about alleged (but false) Iraqi mobile biowarfare labs, as one of the bases for sending U.S. troops into Iraq, along with the lies orchestrated by the U.S. government of infants tossed out of Kuwait’s incubators by Iraqi forces — continue to this very day.

by Mitchel Cohen

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
‑ Voltaire

We take for granted that our government lies to us. The Left agrees with that, the Right does as well, and so do those attempting to straddle the ever‑narrowing fence in the middle. In fact, one of the great, unifying themes of American democracy is the belief by an overwhelming majority of our population that the government
regularly and consistently lies to us.

Depending upon whom you listen to, the reasons behind the lies vary. Sometimes it’s “for your own good”. Sometimes it’s for the sake of “National Security”. Sometimes it’s to “protect corporate investments and private interests from public scrutiny”. But whatever the reason, we all agree that the government lies to us. That’s part of what unites us as a country. It’s a cherished American tradition. We are a nation of “the lied‑to’s”.

Of course rarely will anyone admit to actually believing the lies. Oh, no, we’re much too sophisticated for that! I have yet to meet a single person who believes, for example, that President Reagan is actually trying to support an end to Apartheid in South Africa with his “constructive engagement” ruse. It’s clear that’s just a phrase to make palatable the U.S. government’s continued funding of the apartheid regime. Still, Americans have a collective appreciation for a well-constructed euphemism. My current favorite is the President’s dubbing of the MX nuclear missile “The Peacekeeper”! We chortle gleefully at the glib turns of phrase while all the while knowing, of course, that a ruse is a ruse is a ruse. We are a nation of bedtime story-lovers, and no one is better than President Reagan than spinning tall tales, often right on the spur of the moment, to tuck us in at night.

I admit that it did take me a while to imagine our so-called “founding fathers” — Tom Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams ‑‑ let alone Benjamin Franklin, to whom President Reagan compared the contra death squads in Nicaragua ‑‑ carrying M-16s and slogging through the muck of Honduras, along its border with Nicaragua. Even more preposterous, their distribution of “how‑to‑murder” manuals, which were in fact prepared in secret by the CIA! I much prefer the bed-time story of the founding fathers’ distribution of the declaration of independence celebrating freedom from foreign domination.

When one hears first hand accounts by peasants living in Nicaragua of how the contras, funded by the U.S. government, raped their mothers while they (as kids) were forced to watch, and how the contras jabbed knives into their mothers’ vaginas and jagged upwards, flaying them open while still alive, one wonders which of our “founding fathers” President Reagan was dreaming of.

Was it true that “the contras really cut off the heads of doctors and teachers just north of Jinotega,” as the newpapers reported, and rolled them down the dirt streets like soccer balls as a lesson to the poor peasants for housing such “communist” medics who treated the sick for free and taught the illiterate to read and write? I had to find out for myself. And so in 1983 I visited that beautiful mountain town, very poor, and heard the stories. To my horror, I found that the worst things said about the contras in the U.S. barely scratched the surface! The U.S. government’s lies to the contrary, the Nicaraguan people despised the contras, even those who voted for oppositional candidates to the Sandinistas in the recent elections.